In this case study we return to the Botany students and their encounter with the use of the scientific method of enquiry into the phenomenon of apical dominance in plants. The results, you will remember, were not all that we hoped for in this think-band-do-for-yourself type of experiment. The encounter in most groups scored too low on effectiveness (-/+) and efficiency (-/+). What was the problem? What was the solution?
One contributory factor was certainly a fault of my own as the most experienced course designer in the team. I had forgotten a golden rule of course designers: always involve all the teachers who are going to teach in the making of their course. Out of nine group leaders (teachers and teaching assistants) we had only been working with five. Four had never been given the chance to make the new-style experiment their own. When the time came to install the course, the new ‘plan, structure and strategy of instruction’ was for these four a relative stranger. In some respects it was also an unfriendly one!
A second contributory factor was the heterogeneous composition of the student groups. Some students were surprisingly competent and original in their hypothesizing. Others were not. The best found the step-by-step learning process a bit of a nuisance and not efficient. They wanted, in fact, to teach themselves.
Many students meant many plants. Many plants required much space. The teaching-learning situation in the laboratory was not the easiest to manage. This was a third factor which made the learning experience less effective and less efficient than it might have been.
A fourth contributing factor was a group leader difference. Some leaders were not as experienced as, for example, the two teachers who initiated the new-style experiment. A teacher’s guide which was designed to minimize this problem was not as helpful as had been hoped.
What was the solution?
This was one of the rare occasions in design decision-making when it made sense to let the worked-out design (with its problems) ride out the storm. From the positive reactions that we had got we knew there was a good chance that some of the problems should correct themselves. We knew that both the teachers and the curriculum would benefit from further experience in working with this type of design. For safety’s sake I had a contingency solution in my mind. The back-up solution concentrated on giving more chance for teachers and students to speed up or slow down the learning process. It made use of a spiral sequence (see Chapter 3). Five S-R events (A to E) were involved, and three levels of learning were possible.
Event A would become an each-time-around teacher intervention. Events B, C, D and E would involve real (or on paper) exercises in, successively, ‘phenomenon observation’, ‘general hypothesis formulation’, ‘work hypothesis formulation’ and ‘hypothesis testing plus the drawing of conclusions’. Students could be seen entering the spiral of St events singly or in small groups. Their level of entry was determined by their knowledge of the phenomenon of apical dominance and their knowledge and skill in the use of the scientific method of enquiry. In principle they would move at their own pace along an upward, spiraling pathway to the experiment’s end goal. Their point of entry was to be determined in consultation with the laboratory teacher in the first intervention event.